How to configure a server with nginx on for load balancing only?

Question

There are many tutorials out there explaining how to set up nginx 1.4.6 as a load balancer but I did not get beyond receiving a 502 Bad Gateway or 403 Forbidden configuring it on an Ubuntu 14.04 server with ssh only (no apache or lighttpd, no application running). After installing nginx and running the service, I get the default nginx page when I enter the domain (A record pointing to the IP of the machine).

The nginx.conf looks as follows. All I added is the upstream and server config. This now results in displaying the default nginx page instead of showing the content on the servers defined for load balancing.

user www-data;
worker_process 4;
pid /run/nginx.pid;

events {
        worker_connections 768;
}

http {
        sendfile on;
        tcp_nopush on;
        tcp_nodelay on;
        keepalive_timeout 65;
        types_hash_max_size 2048;

        include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
        default_type application/octet-stream;

        access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;

        gzip on;
        gzip_disable "msie6";

        include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
        include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;

        upstream appdomain.org {
                server s1.appdomain.org;
                server s2.appdomain.org;
        }

        server {
                listen 80;
                location / {
                        proxy_pass http://appdomain.org;
                }
        }
}

Answer 1

you are getting the default nginx page because it is reading from a file in

/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

take your upstread and server block and move it in the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default file or whatever is there and restart nginx it might start working